The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(90)
She leaned against her car, an old dark-green Mazda (fond memories there too, though the backseats were comically small). There was no room inside the garage for a second vehicle. Much of the rest of the space was occupied with a shabby workbench and limp storage cartons, inscribed with faded labels describing contents. Mothers dishes. Clothes for goodwill. Textbooks/diapers.
He said, “I’m not making, you know, light of it or anything. I mean, it’d be a change for you.”
“California?” she asked. “Why California?”
“Have you ever been?”
Adeela fired a thoughtful look, tilting her head. “In a land long ago, far away, there was a magical place out to the west, beyond the far reaches of humankind.”
Vimal sighed. Now she was being sardonic. “I’m just—”
“Disney, Legoland, San Francisco, Yosemite. I skied in July at Mammoth.”
“I didn’t mean it to sound like you were…what’s that word?”
“Young, provincial, naive?”
He sighed, but only slightly. Then recovered. “So? Did you like it?”
“Vim! Of course. That has nothing to do with anything. How can you just pick up and go—and expect me—”
“Not expect.”
“—to go with you?”
“UCLA has a fine arts program with a sculpting track. And a great medical school. I checked.” Then he took her hand.
“This isn’t the time to be thinking about that.” Her brown eyes narrowed. “You’re a witness to a murder. Do you get it, that this is not a normal time? Is that registering with you? You’re joking about adventures. This is serious!”
“I’m not saying we jump on the train today. I’ll go and then I’ll find a place and—”
“Train to California?” Her beautiful sculpted brows furrowed. “Oh, because you can’t fly because you’re on a watchlist. People don’t take trains across the country, Vim. Does that tell you anything?”
He fell silent. “Would you consider it?”
“Vim, just tell him you don’t want to cut anymore.”
He released her hand, stepped away and walked to the small window in the side wall of the garage, grimy and half obscured by a persistent weed. He laughed softly at her comment, which appeared to be a non sequitur, but was in fact the whole point of his fight.
His father, the person the police couldn’t protect him from.
The person he was fleeing as ardently as he was the killer.
Vimal loved Adeela Badour. He’d fallen for her the first time he’d seen her. It was in a coffee shop in Greenwich Village—one of the old-time ones, way-way-way pre-Starbucks. She’d been poring over a detailed diagram of the heart in an anatomy book and whispering the names of veins and arteries and muscles—or whatever medical students need to know about the pump, which was presumably everything.
He’d sat down and opened his Michelangelo book.
The ice-breaking conversation was, of course, anatomy. Flesh and blood, in one case. Marble, in the other.
They’d begun dating not long after that and had been in a monogamous relationship since then. From early on the subject of marriage surfaced regularly in his thoughts. On some days, he viewed marrying her as a goal that could be achieved by practical planning, like with most couples. Other days, more frequent, their saying “I do” was about as feasible as using their arms to fly.
The problem was that Romeo and Juliet thing.
The Lahoris were Kashmiri Hindu. Kashmir is a beautiful region in the north of the Asian subcontinent, but one that has for ages been the center of conflict. It’s claimed by India as well as by Pakistan and, halfheartedly, by China. For more than a thousand years, rule of the region as a whole, or portions of it, has traded hands among Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders—and the British too, of course, who came up with one of the more curious names ever for a country: the Princely State. In recent years the Hindu population of Kashmir, largely Saraswat Brahmin, lived in Kashmir Valley. Representing about 20 percent of the region’s inhabitants, they were a people moderate in their religious practice and they comfortably blended spiritual and secular lives, avoiding as much as they could the simmering turbulence of the area.
Inevitably, the peace and isolation didn’t last. In the 1980s a militant Kashmiri independence movement arose, composed largely of radicalized Muslims. Its mission was ethnic cleansing, which resulted in the infamous Exodus of 1990, in which more than 150,000 Kashmiri Hindus fled. Those who didn’t risked death. In the end, only several thousand Hindus remained in the valley.
Vimal was born in the United States and had no personal knowledge of these events—which were, of course, hardly topics touched upon by world history classes in American schools. But he was an expert on the independence movement, the rapes and murder, and the Exodus because Papa lectured him and Sunny on the topic frequently. Papa had been in the United States when the Exodus occurred but a number of his relatives had to abandon their homes, leaving all behind, to be relocated to India proper—the congested, polluted urban sprawl of the National Capital Region—Delhi. Several older aunties and uncles died prematurely, Papa was sure, because of the resettlement.
Papa harbored deep, unrelenting resentment toward all people Muslim.
Adeela Badour, for instance—had he known about her.